Courant’s Venkatesh Wins Young Mathematicians Prize for Work in Analysis

By James Devitt

Akshay Venkatesh, an associate professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, was recently awarded the 2007-2008 Salem Prize. The prize was established by the widow of Raphael Salem and is awarded every year to a young mathematician judged to have done outstanding work in Salem’s field of interest—the theory of Fourier series, an infinite series used to solve differential equations.

The prize committee noted Venkatesh’s contributions to applications to classical and modern problems in number theory in its announcement of the award.

Born in New Delhi and raised in Australia, Venkatesh is the only Australian to have won medals at both the International Physics Olympiad and International Mathematics Olympiad at the age of 12. He received his BSc. in mathematics and physics at the University of Western Australia, Perth in 1997 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 2002.

Venkatesh is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Clay Math Research Fellowship, a Hackett Fellowship, and the J.A. Woods Memorial Prize. Prior to coming to NYU in 2005, Venkatesh held a C.L.E. Moore Instructorship at MIT.